From a learner's point of view, good code has a lot to do with intuition. It is not true that all good code is understood intuitively. This is due to the necessity of knowing a bit about idomatic Perl and allowing your intuitions to develop before you can really understand someone else's code. Of course, it also helps to know how that person thinks ;)

Unfortunately, the average learner doesn't know enough to have developed good intuition, so comments have to play a role somewhere. Perl can appear to be cryptic because of the shortcuts (e.g. syntactic sugar) that have been built into the language. And then there's the tendency to solve all problems with regular expressions...

So for me, good code is code that is clear once you read it (two or three times) and that has explanations for the stuff that is not so clear.